The moral roots of liberals and conservatives

What I enjoy about having some vacation time is allowing my mind freer range than it usually has when I’m in the thick of serviing my congregation. Somehow I missed this fantastic TED talk from 2008 that I highly recommend: Jonathan Haidt: The moral roots of liberals and conservatives. As the election heats up, the divide between liberals and conservatives likely will increase as Democrats and Republicans throw mud at each other. As I serve a congregation full of people who identify as liberals, this will increase the tension within the congregation with our conservative minority.

I listened to a recording of a workshop at our yearly General Assembly (end of June 2012 in Phoenix) titled: Crossing Political Borders and Breaking Down Barriers. It featured readings of actual statements by conservative Unitarian Universalists, the way they were sometimes treated and the emotions they felt. Many Unitarian Universalists strive very hard to transcend the cultural and racial barriers that can make some of our congregations an unwelcoming place for those who are not college educated and culturally sophisticated, middle class Americans of Northern European descent. This workshop pointed out we do not do very well with political barriers. Unitarian Universalism is not, cannot and should not be the religious arm of the Democratic party.

That is why Haidt’s talk is so good. He identifies five cross-cultural foundations of morality: Care for each other and resistance to harm, fairness/reciprocity, tribalism/sub-group loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. I encourage you to watch the video to see which ones are valued higher by liberals and which ones valued by conservatives. I’ll just say here that there are some significant differences. What was interesting to me was seeing the spread among the liberals vs. the relative equal weighting of all of them by conservatives. Watch the talk.

I think Haidt is right that all five are important to build and sustain a good society. They need to be in an appropriate balance with each other. That balance happens when we appreciate and work out our issues with the ones we are uncomfortable with. For Unitarian Universalists, (and most Americans I might add) is respect for the value of authority.

I’ll be taking some of my own medicine on this as I work out my own authority problems too!

4 Responses

Rev. Trumbore, when I clicked on this post, I expected to see something that trashed conservatives. As a conservative evangelical, I was pleasantly surprised to see that your post did not do that. Thank you for what you wrote.

Sam I really enjoyed this 2008 talk by Jonathan Haidt . Some of the most important ideas that I took away were about how we can develop a “team mentality” and become trapped in a “moral matrix” that cancels out our open mindedness and creativity.

His ideas about the need for some kind of balance between change and stability was useful in understanding the rigidity that can develop if there is an over emphasis on loyalty, authority and purity and the chaos that can result with a complete absence of these qualities.

Then there’s the idea of cooperation as an evolutionary adaptation but if it’s carried too far and creates teams of “us and them” then war and competition can develop. The psychology of teams shuts down open mindedness and we need to develop moral humility versus a moral matrix.

So it’s important to be more civil and open minded within our communities of cooperation.
I like this quote:“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind’s worst disease.” Zen master Seng-ts’an.

Unfortunately it’s difficult to achieve this kind of Zen detachment in our polarized country right now and with high stakes for continuing harm and lack of fairness.

Two other quotes that I really liked from his talk were:

“The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.” and
“[Politics is] about the eternal struggle between good and evil, and we all believe we’re on the good team.”

Did Haidt include the seven Unitarian Universalism principles in his survey? Or is this more from the conservative’s viewpoint as in: here are five principles that conservatives value and, oh look, only some of them are valued by liberals too.

I’m reading his book right now. Don’t think he says much about UU’s but his critique of liberals goes just as much for UU’s. I’m watching some of the comments from people on the floor of the Democratic convention in Charlotte. Many sound like UU’s.

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